HN Hiring Trends

hn-hiring-trends-mcp

Which skills are tech companies hiring for, and which are rising? An MCP server that reads every Hacker News "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread (one per month, 250–500 job posts each) and turns them into skill demand trends, remote and salary stats, and searchable job posts.

No API keys. One line to install.

You:    Which skills gained the most demand on HN hiring threads this year?
Claude: [rising_skills(months=12)]
        • "AI agents" went from 11.3% to 14.7% of job posts (+3.4 pts); in
          September 2026 alone it was in 17.4% of posts.
        • Python +2.5 pts, LLM +2.1 pts.
        • Frontend fell 4.3 pts and React 2.7 pts.

_{Summarized from real tool output: Oct 2025–Sep 2026, 3,788 job posts.}

Why

You want to know	Without it	With hn-hiring-trends
Is Rust (or Go, or Elixir) worth learning?	Gut feeling, hype on X	skill_demand shows its share of job posts, month by month
What's rising in tech hiring	Read 400 posts a month	rising_skills ranks ~70 skills by change
Who's hiring remote Rust devs with visa sponsorship	Ctrl-F across threads	search_jobs(["Rust"], remote_only=True, visa_only=True)
What a senior engineer earns	Scattered posts	hiring_snapshot gives median and middle-half salary from stated ranges

How it works

flowchart LR
    C[Claude / MCP client] -->|tool call| S[hn-hiring-trends-mcp]
    S --> A[HN Algolia API: monthly threads + all top-level job posts]
    A --> P[Parse: company, remote/hybrid/onsite, visa, salary range]
    P --> K[Skill matching: ~70 tuned patterns, or any phrase you pass]
    K -->|shares, trends, matching posts| C

A post "mentions" a skill once no matter how often it repeats it, so shares are "% of job posts asking for X". Ambiguous words get tuned rules: Go doesn't match "go-to-market", C doesn't match "Series C", Java doesn't match "JavaScript". Past months never change and are cached on disk (~/.cache/hn-hiring-trends).

Install

Requires uv.

Claude Code

claude mcp add hn-hiring-trends -- uvx hn-hiring-trends-mcp

Claude Desktop / Cursor (claude_desktop_config.json / .cursor/mcp.json)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "hn-hiring-trends": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["hn-hiring-trends-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Tools

Tool	What it does
hiring_snapshot	One month: post count, remote/hybrid/onsite and visa shares, salary medians, top skills
skill_demand	% of posts mentioning each of 1–10 skills, month by month, with the change
rising_skills	Biggest gainers and losers among ~70 skills (recent half vs earlier half of the period)
search_jobs	Posts mentioning all your terms; filter remote-only or visa; returns company, header, salary, link
hiring_threads	The monthly threads available

Prompts: monthly_hiring_report (a shareable monthly summary), skill_outlook ("should I learn X, Y or Z?").

Try these

• "Should I learn Rust, Go or Elixir? Use 18 months of HN hiring data."
• "Write this month's HN hiring report."
• "Find remote Python jobs that mention LLMs and sponsor visas."
• "What's the median salary in posts that mention Kubernetes?"

Limits

• One slice of the market: HN skews toward startups, remote work and US/EU tech.
• Skill matching is keyword-based; context like "nice to have" is not separated from "required".
• Salaries are parsed from stated yearly ranges only (about a quarter of posts state one).

Part of the keyless MCP series

Open-source MCP servers that answer one market question each, with public data and no API keys.

Server	Question it answers
review-miner-mcp	What do users hate about competitor apps and games? (App Store + Steam reviews)
pricing-time-machine-mcp	How did a SaaS pricing page change over the years? (Wayback Machine)
hn-hiring-trends-mcp (this one)	Which skills are tech companies hiring for, and which are rising? (HN Who is hiring)
model-price-radar-mcp	What does each LLM cost, and did it get cheaper? (OpenRouter + price history)
launch-detector-mcp	What is a company about to launch? (certificate transparency logs)

Development

uv sync --extra dev
uv run pytest                          # offline tests with a mocked Algolia API
uv run python scripts/smoke_live.py    # live check against hn.algolia.com
uv run --with rich python scripts/demo.py 12   # terminal demo (vhs docs/demo.tape records the GIF)
npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uv run hn-hiring-trends-mcp   # click-through UI

MIT © Ali Altunar